About Me

For the past 6 years, I have honed my skills of patience and multitasking as a first grade teacher. My school required teaching coding to all grade levels. I knew nothing of coding myself, and had no idea how I’d teach it to my six and seven year old students. It didn’t take me long to see how beneficial the coding programs we used were to all of my students. I loved that the coding programs were teaching them to try a solution, even if it failed. Students usually struggle with handling setbacks, but coding was teaching them grit, perseverance, and self-reflective analytical skills. This process drew me into coding as well. I found the combination of design and coding to be a thrilling opportunity for me and started my apprenticeship in Web Design at Bloc in 2018.

Planning lessons involves crafting the content (what to teach), process (how to teach it), and product (how to know they learned it). My goal as an educator was to keep each aspect simple, and make sure there were no unnecessary barriers to my students’ learning. I wanted to design experiences that made their learning as easy as possible. I will do the same as a UX designer. I want to remove the barriers users might find in their digital experiences, and just as I did with my students, I want the users that encounter my products to be successful.

Through my years evaluating educational technology in the classroom, many struggled in one particular aspect across the board: user experience. This often overshadowed quality content. I saw the detriment a bad user experience could have: lost sales, and ineffective implementation of programs for longevity. This experience was a major lesson: if the user has trouble accessing the program easily, you will not have a user for very long (if at all). I realized my two passions, web design and education, had an overlap: designing developmentally appropriate user experiences for children that are authentically beneficial to teachers. As a UX designer I will build technologies with a keen focus on elegant solutions to user problems, so that they can actually enrich and benefit all users!

In my free time I enjoy travel, seeking out the best food, traveling to seek out the best food, and spending time with my cat Mr. Rocky Balbowie. I was a national champion rower in the olden days, and spent my formative years racing down Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas while in school at UT. Hook 'em! I'm an avid weight-lifter and yogi, and always look forward to savasana in class.